FreeOrion

I don't follow. Everything is pretty much equally obvious in both UIs. Obviously, a white font on black background provides the most intense contrast, but it's not necessary to go that far in most cases. That's programmer's art(no offense). Experienced artists are usually able to work in much more subtle(and appealing) ways. For example, in Eleazar's mockup, there's a distinction in color/contrast between and collapsed dropdown menue and a dropdown that's open.

Anyway, aesthetic UI changes are probably not going to happen in the near future, because all we need at this point is a functional UI. So don't worry. Maybe Eleazar has some feedback for you, I'm sure he appreciates the critique.

A final suggestion, addressing your point,I hope:


Instead of increasing the contrast of the editable fields, I've decreased the contrast of the line descriptions.

Well maybe this is just an issue with my monitor (which has thus far worked great) or my eyes, but the only thing that I can see clearly highlighted in Eleazar's mockup is the open droplist. There seems to be also a slight difference in shades between the window background grey and the editable fields background grey, but because this difference is quite minor, at least I have a hard time noticing it most of the time.

The following might have also created some confusion:



Now what I meant by subtle was that the change shouldn`t be from an all black background to an all light grey background, because if I am not completely mistaken the lighter the grey background becomes the more difficult it is to read the white text. However I didn`t mean that if something is highlighted the highlighting should only be barely noticeable, as if this is the case then there isn`t much point in highlighting something in the first place.



And now the editable fields are clearly visible, but the line descriptions are not. If you ask me the ideal situation would be that both texts would be clearly visible, but the editable fields (because they are highlighted) would clearly stand out. Anyway in my opinion this difference works quite well in current (0.3.14) version.



This is also true. I actually started to make some of my own experiments with the UI colours (mainly very dark grey and black) yesterday and found out that this…



… seems to be the case.

_________________
What is your favourite alien species and WHY?
Preliminary thoughts about diplomacy
Some unfinished ideas for specials

Ok, I think it's quite obvious now your monitor isn't calibrated correctly or doesn't have the ability to properly differentiate between certain tonal ranges. The differences between the background and the editable field is definitely quite noticable, the line descriptions in my mockup can be easily read as well.

Check out this image. Can you distinguish between all 9 shades evenly and can you read both rows of 1...8 clearly? Even if you can, there might be some issues, but it's a first easy test. If you can't then you need to adjust your gamma settings.

Am I guessing right, you are using a CRT monitor?



Yes, unfortunately.

Actually, things have gotten a lot better since that post. Most of the UI, or at least a lot more of it, should be using appropriate colour from the current set of configurable options.

Edit: If you're not sure whether you're seeing the default colours, you can delete your config.xml, or you can right-click on the colour pickers on the options screen and select the "Reset" command in the resulting pop-up menu. /Edit

My monitor is a LCD monitor and yes I can distinguish between all 9 shades clearly. However I have a mild Red-green colour vision deficiency, which might help to explain why I prefer larger differences in shades than what can be seen on eleazar`s picture. This deficiency hasn`t ever been a problem for me in real life and it was only noticed by using the Ishihara color test pictures, like the one in the link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ishihara_9.png

According to English wikipedia a person with a normal colour vision should see the number 74 in that picture, but I see the number 21 in that picture.

Anyway can you really say that the difference between the window background shade and the editable fields background shade is about equal in eleazar`s picture and your 0.3.14 screenshot? Because the way I see it, this difference is more noticeable in the 0.3.14 screenshot and this also makes the editable fields more visible in that picture.

And yes the line descriptions in your latest mockup can be read, but not as easily as in eleazar`s original picture.

_________________
What is your favourite alien species and WHY?
Preliminary thoughts about diplomacy
Some unfinished ideas for specials

Yes, I haven't changed this, it's identical. I've only touched the descriptions to the left.

In this picture...



...and this? (And I am not talking about the open drop list in eleazar`s picture now.)



Then there is of course the issue with the borderlines, which might make the difference in 0.3.14 picture more noticeable.

_________________
What is your favourite alien species and WHY?
Preliminary thoughts about diplomacy
Some unfinished ideas for specials

I thought you were comparing eleazars mockup and my refinement of his mockup the entire time. The pictures you are mentioning are not the same in contrast, but it's still easily sufficient. I've addressed the issue, that white/on black is usually too harsh and unnecessary and should be avoided.